Being Perfect

Perfect English is our goal and it is pretty easy to realize it as long as we tend to be Perfect 🙂

English provides all the keys to open the doors we haven’t opened yet. An important key is to be found in its perfectiveness.

The Perfect Tenses in English are simply perfect 🙂 The problem is that sometimes they are hard to understand, but I haven’t told you they are impossible. They are friendly, they have been like this since they appeared. They have waited to arouse your interest for ages. Finally, the time has come. Make yourself comfortable and get ready to become PERFECT (and you can be so in the Past, Present and Future, depending again on the perspective you look at things).

Perfect Tenses are formed with the help of the auxiliary ‘have’ + past participle. If you need to state someting in Present Perfect then the auxiliary will be in Present Simple, if you need Past Perfect then the auxuliary will be in the PAst Simple, and if you need Future Perfect (it seldom happens but you never know when you might need it 🙂 ) then the auxiliary will be in the Future Simple.

When it comes to the past participle, remeber about the existance of the irregular virbs in English. If it’s a regular verb then it just adds -ed (the form coincides with the Past Simple Tense of regular verbs). But if it is an irregular verb then check the THIRD column of the list kindly provided to you by anyy grammar book or dictionary. Keep in mind that it is always better to double-check 🙂

Present Perfect

indicates an action that has taken place at an indefinate moment.have / has + VedI have never seen this movie. She has just left. They have been together for ages.

Past Perfect

indicates an action that had taken place before another action in the past.had + VedWhen I entered the house she had already left. No sooner had I learned the rule than I understood everything. When I handed in the test paper I realized I had made several silly mistakes.

Future Perfect

indicates an action that will have happened by another action in the future.will have + VedI will have written the the report by nine o’clock.